The future of Futurism has come and gone, and in some ways it was exactly what Futurists wanted. They demanded speed, noise, and violence, after all, and the twentieth century provided enormous amounts of all three. And when I say “demanded”, that is exactly what I mean: like a political party, the Futurists had a manifesto, penned by Filippo Marinetti. Clause nine was this:

We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

And if you’re thinking that sounds rather, well, fascist, you’re right, because Futurism, despite being an avant-garde, fetishistically modern movement, was closely allied with Italian fascism. If that news comes as a surprise when you open this book, prepare for another surprise as you leaf through it, because Futurist art, at least from masters like Umberto Boccioni or Giacomo Balla, is actually interesting, even, whisper it, skilful. Sometimes attractive too.

What it isn’t, however, is particularly distinctive: much of the art reproduced in this book could have appeared in other books in the series, which covers movements in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth-century avant-garde like Cubism, Minimalism, and Surrealism. No, what makes Futurism distinctive is its bombast, its manifestos, and its political allegiances. They’re all described here, and refreshingly they’re not described in the usual stale bourgeois academese of most modern criticism in the arts.

That’s not to say all the text is worth reading: for me, analysing a picture is like analysing a joke: it destroys any spontaneous enjoyment. Art is about images and intuition; analysis is about words and logic. They take place in different parts of the brain and they shouldn’t be mixed. Perhaps that’s why it’s easier to take Futurist paintings seriously than it is to take Futurist prose:

We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.

Perhaps the most appropriate response to Futurism in theory was Evelyn Waugh’s vignette in Brideshead Revisited (1945) of Futurism in action:

We were joined by a Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere against the lower classes. (Part II, 3)

The battle in this instance was against the lower classes of Britain during the General Strike, and the attempt to join it ended like this:

Jean, who joined another company, had a pot of ferns dropped on his head by an elderly widow in Camden Town and was in hospital for a week.

But the embers of Futurism are glowing yet, and this book is a good short survey of the pre-war fires of energy and excitement that created them.

At first glance, the question seems ludicrous, even crazy. But bear with me and I will present good evidence that it may not be so ludicrous or crazy after all. Indeed, that single stark and simple question is not enough. I want to go further and ask:

Is Mikita Brottman a serial killer with a vile white-supremacist agenda?

Now the question may seem to some even ludicrouser. How on Gaia could Mikita Brottman be a serial killer, let alone a serial killer with a vile white-supremacist agenda? This mild-mannered literary scholar and yoga-enthusiast is a passionate member of the progressive community. She has a PhD in EngLit and another PhD in psychoanalysis. She is a committed reader of the Guardian and has been for decades. She was a core contributor to Cleaner, Kinder, Caringer: Women’s Wisdom for a Wounded World (2008). She has signalled her core commitment to progressive values in a thousand ways in a thousand venues.

Indeed she has. But is “signalled” not the operative word? I would suggest that Brottman, like countless other beneficiaries of white privilege, is an expert at camouflaging herself as progressive while making no real contribution to advancing the progressive agenda. For example, although Brottman has undoubtedly enjoyed white privilege all her life, she has never acknowledged this glaring fact, let alone sought to atone for it. And when she is called out for her white privilege, she resorts to the most disingenuous and transparent tactics of evasion. She has claimed in one interview: “I do not identify as ‘white’ – I identify as Freudian.”

What nonsense! As though Sigmund Freud is not a paradigmatic example of a Dead White European Male! Furthermore, Freud taught us to probe beneath the surface. If what is in the depths were invariably the same as what is on the surface, there would be no need to probe beneath the surface. Q.E.D. We should therefore be very suspicious of Brottman’s progressive veneer and of her claim “not [to] identify as ‘white’.” And that is even before we consider another core data-quantum: her move to the Black-majority city of Baltimore. What was she up to? Indeed, what is she up to? I would suggest that this recent headline provides us with a clue:

BALTIMORE (AP) — Baltimore could surpass New York City in homicides this year. The Baltimore Sun reports that for the first time Baltimore, with a population of less than 620,000, could record more murders in a single year than New York, which has a population of 8.5 million. As of Sept. 3, Baltimore has recorded 238 homicides, while New York City has seen 182 murders.

How on Gaia is it possible that Baltimore, with a population of less than a million, could ever record more murders than New York, with a population of over eight million? Well, vile white racists and white supremacists have an easy answer to that core question. They claim that it is the so-called “Ferguson Effect”, in which protests by the progressive organization Black Lives Matter (BLM) cause the de-policing of vulnerable districts in various American cities. Black-on-Black homicide rates then rise sharply and shockingly – according to the vile white racists and white supremacists.

I have a different and much more plausible theory: that the so-called “Ferguson Effect” is real, but caused not by Blacks homiciding other members of their Community, rather by homicidal white racists seeking to make BLM look bad. And how, you might quite reasonably ask, are homicidal white racists able to operate in vulnerable Black districts without being detected? I will let TransVisceral Books answer that question:

Baltimore Booty: An Anglo Academic Goes Undercover in Da Ghetto

Mikita Brottman’s über-controversial memoir of how she has regularly used skin-dye, wigs and prosthetic buttocks to enter and share the life of one of America’s most vulnerable Black communities. – TransVisceral publicity for Baltimore Booty (2016)

There you have it. On her own admission, Brottman has regularly operated “undercover” in Baltimore’s Black Community whilst wearing prosthetic buttocks in which it would be very easy to conceal lethal weaponry. Perhaps she carries a powerful handgun in the right cheek of her prosthetic buttocks and additional ammunition in the left cheek. Or vice versa. It is impossible to be sure. At this moment in time, we can only speculate as to the precise details of Brottman’s blood-soaked work on behalf of the white supremacist cause.

Nor am I, of course, seeking to suggest that Brottman could be solely responsible for the disturbingly anomalous increase in the Baltimore homicide rate. If my theory is correct, she would be merely one amongst a number of white racists operating in the Black Community while wearing similar disguises. Nevertheless, it is entirely possible that she is the deadliest and most dedicated member of the right-wing death-squad.

And why should she have confined her atrocious attentions to Baltimore? It could very well be the case that this so-called “Anglo Academic” has been at work in other cities subject to the so-called “Ferguson Effect”, such as Chicago, St. Louis and Milwaukee. What can we conclude? It’s simple: Racism Never Sleeps. Nor must anti-racism. And I have only one thing left to say:

Stop.

The.

Brott.

*Simul-scribe of seminal snuff-study Killing for Culture: A Dysmorphic Duo of Death’n’Decomposition-Dedicated Deviants Called Dave Sniff Out the Slimiest Secrets of Snuff’n’Stuff (Visceral Visions 2016).

Note: Post the appalling news from America, we in the close-knit Papyrocentric community feel this is a highly appropriate moment to re-publish this searing indictment of racism, hate and Other-phobia first issued in 2005 by the literary activist Dr Nigel M. Goldbaum (who is, of course, the life-partner of longstanding Papyrocentric favorite Dr Miriam B. Stimbers).

Faut-il Brûler Smith? (Con)futing the Hate Speech of Klarkash-Ton

by Dr Nigel M. Goldbaum

The Other is a liminal mirror in which we see reflected nothing other than the faces, distorted with rage, fear, and doubt, of the sentries patrolling the ambiguous and disputed frontiers of the Self. — Michel Foucault.

In terms of key issues maximally impacting committed members of the equality-activist community in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, there can be little doubt that the keyest is the confrontation with hatred of the Other. Be it in the form of antisemitism, racism, xeno-, gyno-, homo-, and/or lesbophobia, Other-directed prejudice and bigotry is a feral cancer whose seething tentacles cement a visceral shadow as much over the future of western societies as over their past. Yet members of the literary-scholarship community find that their field of critical and theoretic focus, one of the principal means of leveraging progressive ideas/attitudes in terms of the body (socio-)politic, often proves a double-edged discourse.

In short, and to be blunt, many past writers/authors were vicious bigots and/or racists. Nor are participants in “fringe” genres such as Weird fiction, themselves marginalized by mainstream literary discourse, innocent of an identical charge. Members of the Internet community, whether knowingly or unknowingly, can access the following on the Eldritch Dark, the premier web-resource devoted to maximalizing engagement with the literary legacy of Clark Ashton Smith, a core member of the seminal 1920s/1930s Weird Tales literary community:

The vermin is a very Jew, and will have his last ounce of brain and marrow.1

I return the Ullman-Knopf communication herewith. Knopf should remove the Borzoi from his imprint, and substitute either the Golden Calf or a jackass with brazen posteriors. I wish Herr Hitler had him, along with Gernsback.2

Antisemitism, arguably the most feral of all Other-phobic discourses, is a pivotal strand in the fluidic œuvre of Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961), a California poet/author now arguably most famous for his association with New England author/poet H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and Texas writer/author Robert E. Howard (1906-36). Lovecraft’s and Howard’s own and more obvious Other-phobia has been the epicenter of an unswerving critical dissection for a not inconsiderable time-period post the Civil Rights era/epoch, and I would suggest that Smith’s less obvious but arguably, for that very reason, even more pernicious Other-phobia has fallen into the penumbra cast by the brickbats rightly focused around Lovecraft and Howard. The present essay is an attempt, however tentative, inchoate, and embryonic, to corrective this situation and foreground the urgent need for unacceptable components/elements of Smith’s literary/epistolary output to be engaged on multiple levels by committed members of the anti-racist community.

Accordingly, I shall interrogate the conte fantastique by which arguably more than any other the feral parameters of Smith’s visceral Other-phobia can be mapped and/or charted: “The Black Abbot of Puthuum” (1936). Experienced literary exegetists need engage with no more than the title of this fictive discourse prior to commencing a deconstruction of its probable Other-phobic narrative strategies. We confront not ‘simply’ a chromatically unmarked “The Abbot of Puthuum,” nor a chromatically ‘neutral’ “The Red/Yellow/Blue Abbot of Puthuum,” but “The Black Abbot of Puthuum,” and the title immediately and explicitly conjuncts the racial Other of socially constructed Blackness with the textual Other of fictively constructed “Puthuum,” a factitious confection of visceral vocables nevertheless harboring feral echoes of “putridity-putrescence-putrefaction.”

Who could doubt, prior to embarking around a full engagement with Smith’s core narrative structure, that “The Black Abbot” will prove ‘Black’ by both socially constructed race but also by ideologically constructed nature, reinforcing/buttressing traditional Other-phobic discourses whereby Blackness is insolubly conjuncted with notions around soi disant ‘deviance’ and ‘criminality’? It comes as no surprise, then, for the attentive lectrice/lecteur, post reading-commencement, to confront the following literary tropes within the central core segment of the narrative proper:

The black man grinned capaciously, showing rows of discolored teeth whose incisors were like those of a wild dog. His enormous unctuousjowls were creased by the grin into folds of amazing number and volume; and his eyes, deeply slanted and close together, seemed to winkperpetually in pouches that shook like ebon jellies. His nostrils flaredprodigiously; his purple, rubbery lips drooled and quivered, and he lickedthem with a fat, red, salacious tongue before replying to Cushara’s question.3 (Emphases mine.)

We see here an ‘optimal’ conflation of feral Other-phobic narratives of race whose visceral impaction on the reader is rather increased than lessened by the formalism of Smith’s conflicted, eurocentric prose. Indeed, we note that the Abbot becomes not merely the racial Other but the mammalian Other: his dentition is that of a “wild dog,” not that of a human being, and the sexual components of the ‘discourse of deviance’ long woven by white Other-phobes around members of the Black community are signalized in the “fat, red, salacious tongue” with which the Abbot animalistically “licks” his “purple, rubbery lips.” Soon post this passage, the Abbot’s unbridled Other-sexuality is further emphasized/foregrounded as he becomes not merely the mammalian but the vertebral Other:

Neither he nor Zobal was reassured by the look of lust in the abbot’s obscenely twinkling eyes as he peered at Rubalsa. Moreover, they had now noted the excessive and disagreeable length of the dark nails on his huge hands and bare, splayed feet: nails that were curving, three-inchtalons, sharp as those of some beast or bird of prey. (Emphases mine.)

His visceral Otherness has become too ferally impactive to be confined within the anatomic/behavioral parameters of the class Mammalia (mammals) and is transferred even further, to those of the class Aves (birds). The Abbot’s subsequent attempts to both rape Rubalsa, the “queenly maiden” around whose non-consensual purchase and sex-trafficking the narrative centers, but also to murder and devour her ‘protectors’ are further cementings of Other-phobic racist discourses of Black promiscuity, violence, and cannibalism.

The multiply-stranded question that is begged by even a cursory interrogation of the soi disant “Black Abbot” is identical, mutatis mutandis, to that raised by French philosophe / critic / cultural commentatrice Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) in a key mid-twentieth-century text of theoretic and societo-literary engagement: the essay «Faut-il Brûler Sade?» (1951), or “Must We Burn de Sade?”. Here I ask «Faut-il Brûler Smith?» (2005), or “Must We Burn Smith?”. That is, is our objective of a progressive, egalitarian society in which the optimally-diverse value and contributions of all are of equal worth and standing maximally advanced by a visceral suppression of such feral tropes in the work of such writers/authors as Clark Ashton Smith?

Or must we seek another — and indeed anOther — means of transitioning key societal components to our desired post-racist, post-white-hegemonic end(s)? Attractive though the strategy of suppression must appear to those members of the progressive community who fully recognize the dangers of such hate speech, it is nevertheless incumbent on us to engage with issues around pragmatism and acknowledge the impossibility, at the present stage of societal evolution, of successfully fruitioning such a strategy.

Instead, we must adopt the strategy of confrontation and confutation, theorizing/triangulating Smith within the poly-dimensional temporal, societal, and ideological co-ordinates/parameters of his fluidic, polymorphic fictive and meta-cultural identities/personae and explicating, if by no means excusing, his profoundly regrettable co-optioning of Other-phobic discourses of antisemitism and racism.

Mikita Brottman, the notorious “Beast of Baltimore”, is at it again. I have incisively interrogated and corrosively condemned this appalling woman’s crypto-racist and white-supremacist tendencies twice before on Papyrocentric Performativity, in “YaC Attack” and “Knowing Mi, Knowing Yoom”.

But it has made no difference.

In fact, Brottman has plumbed new depths, luring a well-intentioned (but obviously weak-minded) younger woman into her fetid swamp of crypto-fascism. Please examine the following text, class, taken from a web-site set up by Brottman to lure more innocent victims into her white-supremacist web:

When you think of psychologists and clinicians, you probably think of middle-aged men in suits and ties. We are different. We are females with aesthetic inclinations. Our work is intuitive, eclectic, flexible, and doesn’t rely on logic, science, or empirical studies. When it comes to human relationship dynamics, logic doesn’t apply. We rely on other skills: creative thinking, imagination, symbolic and aesthetic awareness, and unconscious perception. (Meet the Team @ Vas Nefandum)

Did you spot it? Did you? In the first two lines? Yes, that’s right: a clear case of suggestio falsi (in line 2) by suppressio veri (in line 1). Look at that disgustingly deceitful claim: “When you think of psychologists and clinicians, you probably think of middle-aged men in suits and ties.”

In fact, no, I don’t think of “middle-aged men”. And neither do you – or anyone else. It’s impossible to think of just “middle-aged men” – psychologically im-possi-bubble. As the Brott-Beast is very well aware, the men hafta have a color. And in this case, it’s a very particular color. The first line shoulda read like this:

When you think of psychologists and clinicians, you probably think of middle-aged white men in suits and ties.

See? White men! That’s what you think of when you think of psychologists and clinicians: white men. But why did the Brott-Beast suppress the truth? ’Coz otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to make this mephitically mendacious claim: “We are different.” ’Coz in fact they aren’t different. The Brott-Beast and her dupe are also white. In the immortal words of The Bay City Rollers:

Meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss.

The Beast of Baltimore (artist’s impression)

The Brott-Beast is not going to give up her white privilege until they prise it from her cold dead fingers. That’s why she pretends that’s she “different”, just ’coz she’s a white woman rather than a white man.

And that’s also why, no doubt, she has chosen to live in Baltimore, where vulnerable Black Bodies are tortured and trashed on a daily – indeed, hourly – basis by the brutal police hegemons of white supremacism.

I’m no expert in her work, but I don’t think the Anglo-American academic Mikita Brottman is a very coherent or profound thinker. Yes, she’s brighter than David Kerekes or Jack Sargeant, but that’s not difficult and her academic specialities prove that she doesn’t know where to draw the comedic line. Being a PhD in EngLit is a good joke. Being a psychoanalyst is a good joke. Being both is grotesque to the point of vulgarity. And vice versa. However, despite all that, I did at least think Ms B was a Good Persun – an Obama-voter, an egalitarian, someone who wanted to make the world a cleaner, kinder, caringer place.

Yes, that’s what I thought.

Then I came across Thirteen Girls, her study of thirteen female murder-victims. I’ve not read the book and I don’t intend to: I got bored with true crime a long time ago. But I don’t need to read the book to be aghast at its ideology. Okay, at first glance, it further exposes the Evil White Male, or EWM/Yoom, and his Evil White Maleness, or Yoomness. But let’s not beat about the bush, or the Brottman: this book buttresses white privilege. And hyper-hypocritically so:

When describing Thirteen Girls, I often refer to Bruegel’s “Fall of Icarus,” in which ordinary people go about their daily routines, barely noticing the tragedy taking place in the background. My students get the analogy immediately, but in the narrow world of publishing and the marketplace, the concept of an unobserved tragedy is definitely not a selling point. (“The Afterlife of Murder”, Mikita Brottman)

Oh, yeah? So Ms Brottman thinks she’s interrogating issues around unobserved tragedy and lives that are lost without the wider world noticing. But all the victims in this book are white. All thirteen of them.Every last flipping one. Even in death, they are benefiting from white privilege and the racist hegemonic mindset that dictates who is seen as Important and who is not. What about the countless Victims of Color (VoC) raped and murdered by Yooms on a daily, indeed hourly, basis? Huh? It is no excuse – no excuse at all – that Brottman is herself not a Woman of Color (WoC). That merely makes it worse. Herself having white privilege, Brottman has used it to buttress the bestial, rather than vocalizing the VoC and interrogating the evil of the Yoom in its full horror. The clear message of this book is that Yoomness only matters if it is directed at white women.

We can see the same message in a recent news-story from South Africa. First, consider a simple fact: not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of Black women have been raped or murdered there by the legacy of apartheid since Yoom fascism was toppled in 1994. But none of that has received a fraction as much attention as the death of a single woman called Reeva Steenbock earlier in 2013. Why? Because Reeva Steenbock was the white girlfriend of a famous white man. And when a Black death does receive publicity – someone was recently tied to a police van and dragged to death by the legacy of apartheid – guess what? The Black victim was male.

This book is another example of that noxious narrative and of the refusal of white-privileged women to show solidarity with VoC’s and stand with them against the Yoom and his Yoomness. There are no two ways about it: Brottman is reinforcing racism, facilitating fascism and nurturing Nazism. And if you think I’m being hyperbolic, consider another simple fact: Nine-Banded Books, the Yoom publisher of Mikita Brottman, is also the publisher of Jonathan Bowden. An infamous fascist philosophaster. Coincidence? I fear not. Ms Brottman needs to repent her white privilege, denounce her publisher and start working against the Yoom, not on behalf of him.

Want to see how a genuinely decent and progressive writer does that? Then look no further than Dr Miriam B. Stimbers and her just-published Re-Light My Führer: Nausea, Noxiousness and Neo-Nazism in the Music(k) of Take That, 1988-2007. Now, there is a woman whose ethics I can respect.